Fruit Loopy.

How come really fancy hotels don’t have complimentary continental breakfast?

That’s not a poem or anything, I’m really asking.

A few weeks ago I stayed in a really crappy little motel and got some free Fruit Loops, terrible coffee and a rock hard blueberry muffin out of the deal. I was very please!

But I recently made a reservation for a really fancy pants hotel and guess what? No complimentary continental breakfast! And the hotel has a restaurant in it and everything! So it’s not like the concept of people eating food just escaped them! No! It’s because they want you to wake up and be all like, “Well gee, I’m hungry gosh darn it! And I would really love a rock hard blueberry muffin right now.” So then you go through your luggage because you’re sure that you packed some muffins, so you dig around in your bag, but beneath the leather straps and gimp mask and ball gag and tub of liquid latex all you find is your back-up ball gag. So then you’re all like, “Well, I guess I should go see if they have any muffins at this restaurant I keep hearing about.” And then BAM! you end up spending a hundred and fifty dollars on eggs Benedict and a cup of fair-trade coffee!

When all you wanted was a crappy, dried out muffin and maybe some Fruit Loops if they’re on offer.

They are manipulating you! Playing upon your most fundamental need for substance! It is a racket! A trick! A sham! A fiat! A gambit! A gauntlet! A hootenanny! A shake down! A bloom’en shame! A hold up! A stick up! A despotism! An Orwellian nightmare of free market capitalism run amuck! A Kafkaesque nightmare of unseen power manipulating your fundamental essence! A Dickensian nightmare of not being given “more” food even when you ask nicely, with your big puppy dog eyes and empty bowl and empty stomach and – quite frankly – your empty heart!

Okay, I know that not all of that is actually true or accurate and some of those things I just said don’t even make any sense in this context … sorry? I got excited. BUT LOOK AT ALL THOSE WORDS I KNOW!

The one place where this whole thing is especially true, but not annoying to me, is Las Vegas. OF COURSE they aren’t gong to give you a free breakfast in Las Vegas! But they make up for it by selling you steak and eggs for a nickel at 4 in the morning. AND they let you play keno while you’re eating! The no free breakfast in Vegas I can understand and respect because the intentions of Vegas are very apparent and it is part of the deal you enter into. They want your money, you want to have a good time and get to use your ball gag. Done. This is the same logic that made it ok for Jay-Z to nark out a bunch of his fans during that late 1990s Napster lawsuit, but not ok for Metallica to do it. As a rapper Jay-Z made it clear that he was in it for the fame and money. Okay, cool, I can live with that. Metallica, on the other hand, was supposedly all about the music and all that inarticulate white man rage and the anti-establishmentarianism-ness, dammit! They had long hair! But then Lars “even my pets think I’m a douche bag” Ulrich personally wheels a titanic full of download records into the courtroom, records with the IP addresses and names of people whose only crime was liking Metallica in the first place. What a fucking prick. I was never a big Metallica fan before that, but since then I have become an anti-Metallica proselytizer.

Um … but I fear that I might have strayed off topic a bit …

I guess the real question to come out of this whole rumination is this: why do you travel with so many ball gags?

.
.
.